


stronger than all my afterthoughts

by kitmarlowed



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 13:33:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9899441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitmarlowed/pseuds/kitmarlowed
Summary: He knows her. She memorises pages of the diary, some of the corners creased and battered with being read and read and read.





	

**Author's Note:**

> loosely based on Fifteen Ways To Stay Alive, a poem by Daphne Gottleib. Title is from Medea, Euripides.

1\. "He answers us in short sentences, doesn’t give anything away that we don’t already know and when he exhausted all that just started saying his name and the last rank he'd held, over and over and over until we got sick of asking questions. He didn’t offer anything, his hands are shackled to the table when we talk to him. When... when we mentioned you, he started to count the minutes aloud."

2\. She watches from behind the screen. When his guards look at him - like a ticking time-bomb, like a traitor - he just smiles at them. How long, she knows he must be thinking, will it take for Rittenhouse to send a man with a gun? Will they unchain him, let him fight, at least? But she knows and he knows that that’s not the Rittenhouse way. He laughs and the guards shift, wary, she sighs and this watching is over.

3\. When she enters the room, she can see him try to ignore the impulse to fight against the handcuffs, to snarl and reach and show her what she’s done. She was frightened of him before she knew, less frightened in the knowing, and now, terrified in the aftermath. She says she sorry, she asks him who caused the busted lip and the bruise high on his cheekbone. He talks back in his own tongue, she's not sure if it's an answer, and when she looks to the guard in askance, he laughs again, cruel and she knows that she deserves it.

4\. "I met with him in his cell like you asked. I warned him, Rittenhouse will try to kill you, I said. He looked at me as if to say: let them. I told him how you much danger you're in, how your parents are both Rittenhouse and how you've gone into hiding, but you're safe now. He just watched me shuffle my papers, expression blank. He tried not to react but when I told him how scared you are... Well anyway, I left the paperclip on the table. I'm sure you'll hear about it on the news. Lucy, please let me know you're getting these."

5\. He offered everything up to her, trusted her when he trusted no-one, gave her the journal in exchange for his family. He'll come looking for her, she thinks, and he'll find her. He knows her.

She memorises pages of the diary, some of the corners creased and battered with being read and read and read. Lucy picks up the phone, listens to Denise's message, and deletes it. Listens to Wyatt's pleas for her to come back, that they'll fight together. Deletes. Listens to Rufus (and Jiya) telling her she needs them, telling her that she can't face Rittenhouse alone. Deletes.

6\. It's a clean knife to everything she knows and she replays it and replays it in her mind:  _Rittenhouse won't allow it_.

And she'd run. Hadn't taken any clothes, hadn't stopped to pack. She took the maximum she could out of her accounts, paid in cash for a room in a run-down apartment building. She's living on take-outs.

Lucy tries not to focus on _you've no idea what you've done_ , on you _age well_. If she does, she doesn't know how she'll manage to stop.

7\. She doesn't realise she's been holding her breath until news breaks: Terrorist escapes high-security military detention center. Public and warned that he may be armed and dangerous and looking for this woman: (they show a photo of her, recent, she's not smiling). Her mother and Noah are on the TV, next, crying and _just want her back_ -ing, and Lucy bites the inside of her cheek.

There's a rage been growing, growing around _some girl who doesn't exist_ , in the pit of her stomach. She unclenches her fists, doesn't panic, won't inhale.

8\. She still misses Amy like she misses the sunshine, staying cooped up inside, but then again staying inside is a choice so maybe not. She misses Amy, like she misses the world before it got so fucked up - before she knew it was so fucked up. Amy and Lucy's past intertwined like vines around each other, inextricable and absent and she's starting to forget. Amy's laugh, Amy's smile, Amy's voice.

9\. She's grown used to hyper-vigilance, the watching and waiting, the tick of her watch as she sits in her armchair in the silence - Agent Christopher said he'd counted minutes, maybe the minutes until he finds her. Which he does, three weeks into her hiding, a week after the broadcast of his escape. He finds her and just stands in the doorway. She has her fingers curled around a knife under the cushion, there's a crowbar just a bit further. She's planned, she's ready but she knows he's twice her size and strong, with sorrow and rage just like the ones she's trying to own but older. He closes the door, drops the duffel bag he'd been carrying, and when he meets are eyes next she knows, without question, that he's not here to hurt her.

10\. She'd practiced how to fight, to punch, to kick, to bite if necessary. Practiced yelling for help in Spanish, French. He lets her throw punches, parries them with ease as she starts to learn. They're both in the fight now, they've both lost their families, their _whole_ families, to it. He tells her he'd rather have her fighting with him that standing at the sidelines, says she deserves to be more than the damsel. She tightens the tape around her hands, looks left in misdirect, lands a hit.

11\. When she kisses him it doesn't feel as much like a betrayal as she'd thought it would, it just feels right.

12\. Convincing Agent Christopher to help her wasn't easy, she tells him, it involved talk of lesser evils, negotiations and a price.

When they fake their joint deaths they stand for a moment, imagining the triumph to come: superheroes. He smiles at her outside the wreckage of the burning car, notes that vigilantism is new on her. It's a good look. She sees the now familiar rage in the flames of the car, reflected from her eyes into his. Superheroes.

13\. She pretends, as they hole-up in New York chasing a lead, that she doesn't miss Wyatt, solid and calm at her back, or Rufus, smart and funny at her side. She pretends that he hasn't noticed, isn't finding himself wavering briefly before pulling the trigger on shots that would never have bothered him before; that she wishes wouldn't bother him now. She pushes _them_  back to the edges of her mind, brings Amy up closer. Amy, who would not be disappointed in Lucy as she fights tooth and nail to get her sister back, to get her world back. Wyatt and Rufus can judge her all they like, but she's made her choice. The most viable option passes her a gun, she doesn't think twice before taking it.

14\. Lucy tries to tell herself that it's nothing, just two angry people, hurting, taking what little they can from each other in a time of war. But then he'll smile, rarely, and she'll hear her own laugh and remember that day on the steps, before. Before.

She doesn't dare think of a time when this is finally, blessedly over. Will she have to walk away from Amy? Will _they_ stay together, partners in misfortune, and let the people they've saved live their lives without the bloodied hands of people who'd loved them so much? Who will look after Amy, their mother being who and what she is?

She shakes her head and turns to him, buries her heart and her thoughts like he's taught her to. Rittenhouse will burn and the world will right itself, it has to.

15\. She'll never forget Amy. Starts to carry Iris and Lorena with her as they go - when it gets too hard for him to carry them - when the blood's too thick to ever dream of getting clean. She wonders if the world will forget Rittenhouse when they're gone.


End file.
